I said I would lay out my thoughts regarding MW releases this weekend, so here goes.
First: I want to provide a regular schedule so users know what to expect, but something that a volunteer (me, for now) can achieve.
Second: I want to provide something that Linux distributors can incorporate into their distributions.
To fulfill the first point, I think a release twice a year -- like Ubuntu releases -- makes a lot of sense. This schedule also works for Linux distributors like Ubuntu, Fedora, and OpenSuSE
Since I started out using Debian (which has now adopted a 2 year freeze cycle), I think it also makes sense to provide LTS support. Platonides and I (but mostly Platonides) have been working with the Debian developers to get 1.19 into Wheezy which was frozen in June.
With that in mind, here is what I propose:
1.18.0 | Security updates till 1.20 1.19.x | April 2012 (LTS) 1.20.0 | October 2012 1.21.0 | April 2013 (Start in May) 1.22.0 | October 2013 (Start in September) 1.23.0 | April 2014 (LTS) 1.24.0 | October 2014 1.25.0 | April 2015 1.26.0 | October 2015 1.27.0 | April 2016 (LTS)
LTS releases will updates until (at least) the next LTS release. This means security updates, but other updates that don't require schema changes if people are interested in providing them. Since a couple of people have put the 1.20.0 milestone on a handful of bugs, I'm assuming now that they think those are worth merging to the 1.20 series. I'd like to get the fixes backported to 1.19 as well, if possible.
Well, that's pretty much it what I was thinking. How does this sound to you guys?